The relationship of job characteristics with in-role and extra-role performance: the mediating effect of job crafting
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing upon the job demands-resources model, the purpose of this study is to investigate the differential relevance of contextual antecedents for job crafting dimensions (i.e. increasing structural and social job resources) and consequently for various aspects of work performance (in-role and extra-role performance). Despite considerable research on the role of job autonomy and social support in predicting job crafting, little attention has been paid to how problem-solving, a knowledge job characteristic, relates to job crafting dimensions.
Design/methodology/approach
Survey data were collected from 282 employees belonging to different information technology companies in Romania. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypothesized relations.
Findings
Problem-solving was positively related to both job crafting dimensions, whereas social support was positively related only to increasing social job resources. Unexpectedly, job autonomy predicted increasing structural resources only when social support was high, as the post-hoc analysis indicated. Furthermore, increasing structural job resources fully mediated the relationship of problem-solving with in-role performance and different types of extra-role behaviors, whereas increasing social resources did not act as a mediator.
Originality/value
The current study is the first to show that problem-solving is an important predictor for job crafting. Furthermore, this study contributes to the literature by revealing that crafting structural resources represents an important mechanism that explains the positive relationship between work design (i.e. problem-solving) and different performance facets.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by UBB-NTT DATA advanced fellowship implemented through the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology of the Babeș-Bolyai University (STAR-UBB Institute), Romania.
The authors thank Thomas Jack for proofreading this article, and for his suggestions and comments on a previous version of the article. Special thanks to Christoph Mengelkamp for his useful comments on the results section, and to Manfred Schmitt for his clarifications on the use of post hoc tests for common method variance.
Citation
Mihalca, L., Ratiu, L., Helm, C., Brendea, G. and Metz, D. (2023), "The relationship of job characteristics with in-role and extra-role performance: the mediating effect of job crafting", Baltic Journal of Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/BJM-05-2023-0191
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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